Alternative medicine poll

The manipulation of an smh.com.au poll has again thrown the spotlight on online voting.

Late last month the Herald reported on a lobby group of more than 400 doctors, medical researchers and scientists – dubbed Friends of Science in Medicine – that is pressuring universities to close down alternative medicine degrees, arguing the practices have no scientific basis.

On February 4, several experts were interviewed for a new article on the topic and the story was accompanied by an online poll asking readers “Should universities teach alternative medicine?”

Voting progressed steadily at first but on Tuesday votes began skyrocketing from about 125,000 to more than 877,000 by the time voting closed on Thursday. The end result was 71 per cent “no”, 29 per cent “yes”.

The number of votes in the poll was about eight times more than the number of online readers of the story, a clear indicator that the poll had been gamed. Fairfax technical staff said the poll logs all but confirmed that the voting had been manipulated.

Nonsense. All that’s happened is that somebody diluted the ‘no’ vote to make it much, much stronger than it was to begin with. Carry on as you were.